Four elements for charity

British author Kate Atkinson. Photo / Supplied

Mark Ellingham (Profile) and Peter Florence (Hay Festival) have compiled four collections of short stories under the title Ox-Tales to raise money for and draw attention to the work of Oxfam. Thirty-eight British and Irish-based writers have contributed, free of charge, either a new story or an extract from a work in progress.

The collections are loosely divided into the four elements that constitute key areas of Oxfam's work: water projects (water), aid in areas of conflict (fire), the development of agriculture (earth) and progress on climate change (air). A brief section at the back of each volume backgrounds why and how Oxfam is working in these four areas.

The calibre of writers included, along with the wide range of subject matter and writing styles, guarantees that a charitable endeavour achieves literary merit. These collections simply hum with stories that entertain as well as offering food for thought.

That Ox-Tales: Earth includes stories by writers as diverse as Kate Atkinson, Ian Rankin, Marina Lewycka, Rose Tremain, Nicholas Shakespeare and Hanif Kureishi underlines how each contribution ends up being distinctive rather than drearily the same. The stories navigate questions of tending, belonging to and being estranged from the earth.

Kate Atkinson's Lucky We Live Now manages to be sinister, thought provoking, witty and inventive all in the same breath, but ultimately this contemporary fable is a sombre take on the relentless greed of humanity. Marti Leimach's moving story, Boys In Cars, shifts the earth theme to the level of daily challenges that face an individual rather than the big issues that challenge the globe. This is a story of supreme patience as a mother guides her autistic son through the necessary stages to attend a friend's birthday party.

In Ox-Tales: Air, the range is equally rewarding. Alexander McCall Smith's Still Life is set in an area of the Scottish highlands accessible only by sea. Air becomes a way of giving life to character, of suffocating and of setting free. McCall Smith's story achieves poetry out of matter-of-factness, and is a striking example of how brevity can give life to so much more.

In contrast, Beryl Bainbridge's Goodnight Children builds a slow and creepy tension as a young boy listens to his grandmother's old mahogany wireless buried in her second bedroom. The airwaves are the conduit for bad news, warnings of death: past, present and future. A third gem, Diran Adebayo's Calypso, uses language in such a fresh, invigorating way, and as vital aid to character. I can't wait to read the completed novel.

The extract reveals a gradual accumulation of heat; the air between these characters is the simmering air of sexual tension, embryonic love. Ox-Tales: Fire takes you in unexpected and satisfying directions with another stellar line-up of authors: Mark Haddon, Sebastian Faulks, John le Carre, Xiaolu Gup, Lionel Shriver and Jeanette Winterson.

The Fire volume also shows there are numerous ways to make a political point without wrecking the literary magic. Mark Haddon's The Island is an absorbing fable on survival that, in an understated way, poses questions on oppression, sacrifice and self-sufficiency. John le Carre's fablesque The King Who Never Spoke is an exquisitely written, witty solution to the world's ills, far-fetched but bemusing.

Not all stories convey a message so nimbly. Victoria Hislop's contribution, with its heavy-handed links between arson and short-lived passion and superficial division between right and wrong, feels more like a sermon. In the final volume, Ox-Tales: Water, water seems to fill every nook and cranny: rivers, beaches, deluges of rain, puddles, teacups and even more beaches.

The standout story for me was Joanne Trollope's The Piano Man, a story that, tenderly and quietly, copes with the immediate aftermath of death. When I sat back to reflect on the twists and turns, the numerous high points and the handful of lows, I kept returning to the first story I read, Rose Tremain's The Jester of Astapovo.

I don't want to spoil the delicious build-up of characters, but the premise is that the extraordinary Leo Tolstoy dies in a very ordinary, out of the way place. The result is literary magic.

* Ox-Tales: Earth Ox-Tales: Air Ox-Tales: Fire Ox-Tales: Water (Profile Books, $15.99 each)
Reviewed by Paula Green

* Paula Green is an Auckland poet and children's author.